Chương 38: 16-1.Monsters, Fear, and Ruin

That fractured song kept circling overhead, refusing to die.

"O say can you see, by the dawn's early light..." It wasn't coming from any single direction. What made it truly unbearable was how it seemed to seep from the very bones of the concourse itself. Every black-mouthed speaker embedded in the walls, every split metal housing clinging to the pillars, every dust-choked fixture suspended beneath the ceiling—all of them hissing with the same electrical static.

The song had been torn apart and reassembled wrong, each word still falling when the next crawled in from somewhere further away, like dozens of rotting mouths opening and closing in the dark, hopelessly out of sync. I didn't understand a word of it. And that was precisely what made me want to cut my ears off.

"... Young master." Jessi's voice had gone uncharacteristically quiet—the kind of quiet that doesn't want to wake anything.

"What."

"I'm taking back what I said before." She kept her eyes fixed on the darkness above, fingers locked white around her short sword.

"The doll was still disgusting. But this wins."

"Congratulations on completing your terror rankings update."

"Shut up, I'm actually kind of—" Alvira raised her hand and cut us both off before Jessi could finish.

"Stop talking. Listen." So we did. Only that song remained, drifting from whatever dead country had spawned it, slowly saturating the atrium. Threaded through every note was a grinding metallic undertone, like someone dragging a rusted blade down the inner walls of this ruin, one deliberate stroke at a time. Each sound bored straight into the roots of your teeth, making the back of your neck crawl. Matthews pressed his shield forward slightly.

"Direction?"

"It's not moving." Alvira's gaze swept the crackling devices around the concourse.

"More like the entire system woke up at once."

"That is not remotely reassuring," I said.

"I wasn't trying to reassure you." Right. This woman apparently considers comfort a waste of breath. Lucas swallowed hard. The hand holding the lantern was visibly shaking, but he forced himself to look ahead.

"If the broadcast system still has power, there should be a control room nearby—security office, or some kind of central management hub. Around the main service desk, you'd typically find—""Typically?" I shot him a look.

"How many Old Civilization malls have you personally visited?"

"The books say—""Close your mouth and lead." He shut up with an expression of profound personal injury and moved forward with his lantern. Formation held. Matthews on point, shield angled low. Jessi and I flanked him to the rear, eyes tracking every storefront, every pillar, every shadow deep enough to hide something with teeth. Lucas in the middle, muttering half-intelligible interpretations under his breath. Alvira at the back, moving like a shadow that had decided to follow us.

The positioning alone kept every nerve pulled taut—but that song hanging overhead made each step feel less like scouting and more like being called by name at a funeral conducted in a language I'd never understand. We skirted the edge of the atrium toward the semicircular service counter. Passing a row of glass display windows, I glanced inside without thinking. A clothing shop. Or what had been one.

White mannequins stood throughout the dark interior, draped in Old Civilization garments that had rotted into hanging rags. No faces. No eyes. Just smooth, unsettling heads and limbs, half-lit by our passing torches. Some had toppled and lay with limbs splayed. Others still held their display poses—one arm raised, one leg stepping forward—as though waiting for customers who had stopped coming a thousand years ago. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent.

Report it. I meant to look once and move on. Then the torchlight swept across one mannequin's side, and I had the sudden conviction that it had moved. Barely. A shift no larger than a trick of light. I stopped.

"What is it?" Matthews asked under his breath. I didn't answer. I just stared at that row of white figures. The torch crackled softly. The song circled overhead. Those pale bodies stood motionless in the dark, quiet as a row of graves that had already been emptied. Had I imagined it? Just as that thought formed, the abdomen of the innermost mannequin slowly—very slowly—bulged outward. Not the whole figure. Not the shell. Something inside had pushed. Every hair on my body stood up at once.

"Back up." The words came out low and immediate. Jessi had seen it too. She'd been standing just behind my right shoulder. Now she made no sound at all—just sucked in a sharp breath like ice water had been poured over her, her feet drawing half a step toward me on pure instinct.

"... There's something inside that." Before the words had fully left her mouth, the mannequin's chest bulged again. Crack. A dry, wrong sound—not bone, but the noise a hollow shell makes when something forces it open from the inside. The fracture spread from chest to shoulder. A thin black seam surfaced on the white casing, then the whole section bowed outward and split with a sharp snap. Dark, viscous fluid began oozing through the gap, trailing down the mannequin's flank with sickening deliberation.

Then came the smell. Not simple decay. This was sulfur layered over blood that had dried too long ago, over the scorched bottom of an iron pot that had cooked something it shouldn't have, all laced with a cold, sweet metallic tang that hit the back of the throat like a fist. The moment it reached my nose, my stomach lurched toward my throat.

"Gods—" I heard myself say it in a voice like I'd swallowed ash. It wasn't just the one. Another toppled mannequin suddenly convulsed. It had been lying on its side—now its back arched violently, as though something pressed against the inner surface was dragging claws outward inch by inch. More cracking sounds followed in rapid succession, cutting through that grotesque singing with horrible clarity. Crack. Crack-crack. Snap. White fragments scattered across the floor. And then the thing crawled out.

I swear to every god that has ever been named—that was the most abhorrent creature I had ever seen. No. Living wasn't the right word. Just looking at it felt like an insult to the concept of being alive. The legs came first. One. Two. Three—no, more. Charred, scaled, corpse-pale, some ending in human knees and toes bent at angles that had no business existing.

They varied wildly in thickness—some as broad as a grown man's thigh, others withered to skin over bone—yet all attached to the same bloated, contorted torso. They weren't standing so much as assembling a shape capable of forward motion: a massive spider that had been crushed and then maliciously reassembled, making do with limbs that had never belonged to each other. When it fully dragged itself free of the shattered debris, I saw it clearly. Three heads.

The left resembled a human face that had been left to char—eye sockets blackened and sunken, lips long gone, teeth exposed in a permanent grin. The right was more bestial: a canine jaw wrenched open to the ears, stringing dark saliva to the floor. The center head was worst precisely because it came closest to human—no skin at all, only exposed red muscle and twitching fiber, a pair of wet, bright eyes set into raw flesh, staring directly at us. All three heads turned at once. Click. Click. Click.

No living thing moves in synchrony like that. Too perfect—not three separate wills, but one thing wearing three faces, looking at us through all of them simultaneously. Alvira's voice fell low and flat.

"... Graftling." Not Kingdom tongue. Something older—elven, or whatever register her kind used when naming nightmares. My throat had gone dry enough that swallowing hurt.

"Alvira. What in every hell is that thing?"

"A composite." She raised her short bow, voice stripped of all inflection.

"Chimeric strain, if you prefer the formal term."

"Neither option sounds better."

"They weren't meant to." Matthews had already stepped forward, shield dropped low, becoming a wall that moved—positioning himself squarely between us and the creature.

"Come on then." One word from the veteran. The thing didn't negotiate. It didn't circle or probe or hesitate. All six legs fired at once, joints cracking like green wood in a fire. That reeking mass dropped low like a spider about to strike— And lunged directly at me. Not Matthews. Not the shield wall. Me. For one humiliating moment I froze. Because it had completely ignored the most obvious target and come screaming over the intercept line straight for the mid-rear position like it had already decided.

"It's going for the back!" The shout tore out of me on reflex.

"Scatter!" Alvira's voice detonated simultaneously. Before the word finished leaving her mouth, an arrow wrapped in compressed green wind screamed past my ear close enough to feel. It moved less like a projectile and more like weaponized weather. The next instant, the right canine head's eye socket exploded outward in a spray of black blood and meat.

"GRAAAAAAH—!" The creature's trajectory lurched sideways. Only slightly. But slightly was enough to keep me breathing. No room to retreat—at this distance, backing up meant dying. I shoved my legs forward, flipped my sword to an upward guard, locked my buckler against my neck, and threw myself directly into the descending mass. The impact hit like a demolition charge. BOOM— The floor fractured outward beneath us. Stench and heat slammed my face. My world narrowed to writhing, malformed flesh.

The desiccated left head wrenched its jaw open and released a shriek pitched to split eardrums. Simultaneously, two massive arms—assembled from twisted corpse limbs—tore free from the torso and came down from both sides like hammers that found breaking bones insufficiently satisfying.